Fix WvW easy: downscale Zergs

It seems like there's a very simple solution to the zerg infestation in W3 and using an existing mechanism nonetheless.

Why not just downscale the bigger team by X level per Y people over the other team, every T minute? Yes it means that given enough time you'll be fighting against level 1 zerglings which would make the whole situation more palatable.

Matches will be more skill based, instead of number based. It will also reduce the overnight flipping during offpeak hours, because a smaller team still has a chance to hold on to bases even when completely outnumbered.

That said I do whish we have a better zerg buster weapons/skills. It's one of the few ocassions I where I wished we still had the Edge of Extinction builds running around from GW1. That'd have been the perfect tool to fight against zergs.

It seems like there's a very simple solution to the zerg infestation in W3 and using an existing mechanism nonetheless.

Why not just downscale the bigger team by X level per Y people over the other team, every T minute? Yes it means that given enough time you'll be fighting against level 1 zerglings which would make the whole situation more palatable.

Matches will be more skill based, instead of number based. It will also reduce the overnight flipping during offpeak hours, because a smaller team still has a chance to hold on to bases even when completely outnumbered.

That said I do whish we have a better zerg buster weapons/skills. It's one of the few ocassions I where I wished we still had the Edge of Extinction builds running around from GW1. That'd have been the perfect tool to fight against zergs.

Its not easy to fix WvW and its called seige and seige placement of arrow carts, catapult and ballista. Even with 2 or 3 people in tower can make a zerg disperse.

While I admire what this proposal is trying to do here, I don't think this is the way to do it.

Take a step back from the problem of the constant zerging, and ask why do people do it in the first place?

The answer is threefold: it's the fastest and safest way to capture objectives quickly, second is people naturally tend to congregate as impromptu teams in these situations anyway, and third is there's not real reward for using any other stategy directly reflected in the scoring methodology.

I believe unless the downleveling is done to a truly ludicrous degree, it won't overcome the inherent flaw of the maps being too small and thus too zerg friendly.

And nothing we ever do short of killing people's characters for being around too many other players will ever really overcome human instinct.

What we really need is map revision, which is hard. A good PvP map is no trivial effort.

But in the meantime what would help would be to take a look at scoring and game data. What gets flipped or taken the most? Could we introduce better incentives for assaulting or holding multiple objectives at once? Redesigning scoring would be hard and would inevitably result in unintended consequences, but it would be doable in a reasonable amount of time.

Changing the way sieges work might be a thought too. Making it much more devastating to lose something, and improving the mechanics by which you can defend it to be more engaging, would do a lot to discourage the "Meh we'll take it back in 2 minutes".

I think mechanically diluting individual players a bit is just treating the symptom, and we need to treat the disease.

Also as for "zerg busting" abilities, as a former DAoC player I can tell you first hand open style PvP with huge powerful AE effects is a terrible idea that only sounds good if you haven't experienced it. DAoC basically had what you're suggesting and it was the worst feature of the otherwise awesome open PvP.

I have played that game before, and it introduces a lot of problems. Look GW2 has class balance issues, this I do not dispute in the slightest, but making AE or AE like abilities rule the the day is not a good direction to take the game because I've been there and done that.

While I admire what this proposal is trying to do here, I don't think this is the way to do it.

Take a step back from the problem of the constant zerging, and ask why do people do it in the first place?

The answer is threefold: it's the fastest and safest way to capture objectives quickly, second is people naturally tend to congregate as impromptu teams in these situations anyway, and third is there's not real reward for using any other stategy directly reflected in the scoring methodology.

I believe unless the downleveling is done to a truly ludicrous degree, it won't overcome the inherent flaw of the maps being too small and thus too zerg friendly.

And nothing we ever do short of killing people's characters for being around too many other players will ever really overcome human instinct.

What we really need is map revision, which is hard. A good PvP map is no trivial effort.

But in the meantime what would help would be to take a look at scoring and game data. What gets flipped or taken the most? Could we introduce better incentives for assaulting or holding multiple objectives at once? Redesigning scoring would be hard and would inevitably result in unintended consequences, but it would be doable in a reasonable amount of time.

Changing the way sieges work might be a thought too. Making it much more devastating to lose something, and improving the mechanics by which you can defend it to be more engaging, would do a lot to discourage the "Meh we'll take it back in 2 minutes".

I think mechanically diluting individual players a bit is just treating the symptom, and we need to treat the disease.

Also as for "zerg busting" abilities, as a former DAoC player I can tell you first hand open style PvP with huge powerful AE effects is a terrible idea that only sounds good if you haven't experienced it. DAoC basically had what you're suggesting and it was the worst feature of the otherwise awesome open PvP.

I have played that game before, and it introduces a lot of problems. Look GW2 has class balance issues, this I do not dispute in the slightest, but making AE or AE like abilities rule the the day is not a good direction to take the game because I've been there and done that.

Why not downscale? We have 80 levels to go from. I'm sure we can make it downscale sufficiently for the disparity in number. Plus we already have the mechanism in place.

Let's assume the difficulty of fighting multiple opponents get exponentially more difficult. So let's downscale the outnumbering team exponentially as well. For every additional player in your team over the other, you lose 2 ^ n levels. If you are only 1 player over, it's no biggie, 2 players, and it will start to hurt. If you're 10 players over the other team, your team effective level will be... dun dun one!

That would be a sure way to break up zergs. Plus your team is now more vulnerable to sieges. You can conggregate all you want but if that pult hits you, everyone respawns.

May I offer a list of things that could help, including an 180 degree turn of thinking from the OP:

1. Upscale NPCs with the zergs. objective NPCs should scale with the number of attackers, creating less incentive for zergs to go after camps and encourage teams to go after hard targets and to not waste their numbers against secondary targets.

2. Remove 5 min. "super buff" on supervisors. 3 thieves should NOT be able to stymie 40+ players to this degree. Inverse to the first rule, make it so that if a team really wants a camp under the 5 min mark, they would have to devote large numbers and therefore not go after the primary targets.

3. New WvW maps with more strategic points in geography. Bring the fight away from consta-trebbing targets and bring it into the open field.

4. With new maps will mean different scoring. Take that chance to increase the PPT of towers, keeps, and SM while leaving camps of lesser importance PPT (making their main focus on delivering and providing supply, making their capture more about the overall strategy than just PPT on the cheap).

May I offer a list of things that could help, including an 180 degree turn of thinking from the OP:

1. Upscale NPCs with the zergs. objective NPCs should scale with the number of attackers, creating less incentive for zergs to go after camps and encourage teams to go after hard targets and to not waste their numbers against secondary targets.

2. Remove 5 min. "super buff" on supervisors. 3 thieves should NOT be able to stymie 40+ players to this degree. Inverse to the first rule, make it so that if a team really wants a camp under the 5 min mark, they would have to devote large numbers and therefore not go after the primary targets.

3. New WvW maps with more strategic points in geography. Bring the fight away from consta-trebbing targets and bring it into the open field.

4. With new maps will mean different scoring. Take that chance to increase the PPT of towers, keeps, and SM while leaving camps of lesser importance PPT (making their main focus on delivering and providing supply, making their capture more about the overall strategy than just PPT on the cheap).

5. Make Outmanned Buff an actual buff.

This will hurt than help situation where you're severely outnumbered.

Those camps are the only way a much smaller team can score anything at all. You'd have no chance taking a keep when it takes you 15 minutes to break in and the other side severely outnumbers you. The zergs will come to you and crush you like a fly.

No, downscale the zergs. Make it so that people break into smaller teams than a giant free for all gravy train.

Also different server has different timezone coverage. Short of making everyone plays all the time, which is not what this game all about you need to figure out ways how a much smaller team can fight when outnumbered 3 or even 4 to 1 which is not uncommon.

Easiest thing to fix 'coverage' issues would be to open SEA servers for GW2 and offer free transfers there for people with an originating IP address from those timezone/coverage areas. In addition, something to get Euro players to play on euro servers.

Easiest thing to fix 'coverage' issues would be to open SEA servers for GW2 and offer free transfers there for people with an originating IP address from those timezone/coverage areas. In addition, something to get Euro players to play on euro servers.

There might be something in there.

I still think there should be another solution so the fight is less about size and more about skills.

The only other way I could think of besides downscaling is to cap WvW entry to the lowest of all 3 sides. Additional players will be queued up and only allowed in if all 3 sides can contribute the same amount of players (unless a spot was freed up). If a server loses a player, all other sides will be barred from adding players, until that player was replaced, or they lose an equal number.

Again the above will prevent Guild bandwagoning as you would want to spread out to less densely populated servers so you can play. If you xfer to JQ for W3, then expect to wait the whole day to get to play - consider that a punishment for stacking the server.

Why not downscale? We have 80 levels to go from. I'm sure we can make it downscale sufficiently for the disparity in number. Plus we already have the mechanism in place.

The game already uses these mechanics in WvW. They don't really work 100%, they just work well enough to give some broad parity. It just won't work.

Look grossly uneven fights between vastly different quantities of players are foundational to any kind of open PvP that's going to satisfy anybody. That kind of unfairness, randomness and possibility is the whole challenge. It's not a sport where both teams get the same number of players, it's a war where resources and strategies matter. One of those resources is quantity of people and how much they participate in your PvP community. Why do you think we have different tiers of WvW servers at all? Because not every server is going to put the same amount of effort into WvW, that's the entire point.

Edit: I'm a JQ player. I'm here because I want to see a huge damn army fight a huge damn army. Other people who don't want that can play in a lower tier. It's simple really.

Let's assume the difficulty of fighting multiple opponents get exponentially more difficult. So let's downscale the outnumbering team exponentially as well. For every additional player in your team over the other, you lose 2 ^ n levels. If you are only 1 player over, it's no biggie, 2 players, and it will start to hurt. If you're 10 players over the other team, your team effective level will be... dun dun one!

I hope you're trolling and I'm just taking the bait, but I'm going to assume you're serious and give you a straight answer as to why this is not a good idea.

To put it concisely, this idea completely contradicts the notion skill should win. These mechanics would result in utterly ludicrous and ridiculous scenarios. They also make it unplayable, how am I supposed to know how many players the other team has at any given time? The fact I don't know is sort of the whole point. The uncertainty is part of the challenge.

The metagame this would create would be completely batshit. Everyone would spread out and want to be nowhere near other players. You'd have a field full of soloers in a a team based game. The idea of strategy and command and placement would be completely gone.

Additionally no one could ever take most of the objectives, ever. Just leave one player in each one, and when the siege force shows up, they'll be reduced to a trivial level and get slaughtered by the guards.

That would be a sure way to break up zergs. Plus your team is now more vulnerable to sieges. You can conggregate all you want but if that pult hits you, everyone respawns.

It would be a sure way to make a terrible mess of the game. Let me repeat myself, I have played this game before. This experience sucks, it sucks hard. It's frustrating, it makes certain things and classes very OP, and it eliminates even more skill from the game.

Look the zerging sucks, but the current meta is hardening against it too, slowly but surely. Stealth sieges, supply starving, defensive siege placement, these are all things becoming more and more established that are effective at stopping zergs butt cold. Also you severely underestimate what defensive siege can do. Get some cannons, arrow carts, etc. set up in advance, and six can stop sixty butt cold.

We need something deeper and more clever to improve things, not a stop gap solution that leads to silly situations. I hope this is a troll.

There is a time and place for zergs in combat. What really needs to happen is to introduce many different things that small groups of players can do that can turn the tide in a match. Also, make it require some skill.

Creating mechanics to even out zerg vs. zerg through artificial means seems like an overly complicated way to try and solve the problem. Plus, I feel that it will somehow be found to be exploitable, depending on how it is implemented.

The game already uses these mechanics in WvW. They don't really work 100%, they just work well enough to give some broad parity. It just won't work.

Look grossly uneven fights between vastly different quantities of players are foundational to any kind of open PvP that's going to satisfy anybody. That kind of unfairness, randomness and possibility is the whole challenge. It's not a sport where both teams get the same number of players, it's a war where resources and strategies matter. One of those resources is quantity of people and how much they participate in your PvP community. Why do you think we have different tiers of WvW servers at all? Because not every server is going to put the same amount of effort into WvW, that's the entire point.

Edit: I'm a JQ player. I'm here because I want to see a huge damn army fight a huge damn army. Other people who don't want that can play in a lower tier. It's simple really.

I hope you're trolling and I'm just taking the bait, but I'm going to assume you're serious and give you a straight answer as to why this is not a good idea.

To put it concisely, this idea completely contradicts the notion skill should win. These mechanics would result in utterly ludicrous and ridiculous scenarios. They also make it unplayable, how am I supposed to know how many players the other team has at any given time? The fact I don't know is sort of the whole point. The uncertainty is part of the challenge.

The metagame this would create would be completely batshit. Everyone would spread out and want to be nowhere near other players. You'd have a field full of soloers in a a team based game. The idea of strategy and command and placement would be completely gone.

Additionally no one could ever take most of the objectives, ever. Just leave one player in each one, and when the siege force shows up, they'll be reduced to a trivial level and get slaughtered by the guards.

It would be a sure way to make a terrible mess of the game. Let me repeat myself, I have played this game before. This experience sucks, it sucks hard. It's frustrating, it makes certain things and classes very OP, and it eliminates even more skill from the game.

Look the zerging sucks, but the current meta is hardening against it too, slowly but surely. Stealth sieges, supply starving, defensive siege placement, these are all things becoming more and more established that are effective at stopping zergs butt cold. Also you severely underestimate what defensive siege can do. Get some cannons, arrow carts, etc. set up in advance, and six can stop sixty butt cold.

We need something deeper and more clever to improve things, not a stop gap solution that leads to silly situations. I hope this is a troll.

Fine, forget the level capping, then next in line is population capping.

Cap the W3 population to the lowest of 3 parties, and only allow additional players if and only if the other parties can contribute the same number of people. If anyone leaves the other side, random boot or block additional players from entering when disparity is detected. Only problem with this is that fewer people will have a chance to play - as opposed to being able to fight but with a handicap that scales with the size difference between teams.

Again they have this system in sPvP I don't see why not bring that over to W3.

And figures you're from JQ.

There is a time and place for zergs in combat. What really needs to happen is to introduce many different things that small groups of players can do that can turn the tide in a match. Also, make it require some skill.

Creating mechanics to even out zerg vs. zerg through artificial means seems like an overly complicated way to try and solve the problem. Plus, I feel that it will somehow be found to be exploitable, depending on how it is implemented.

Yes like any other good game, you need a possibility for an upset victory. Right now there's none. If you're outnumbered 4 to 1 you're toast, unless the other 4 are really stupid - but the law of averages dictates that isn't verly likely to happen.

Honestly, I would wait until Anet removes culling and see how their servers handle it with whatever modifications to the infrastructure and game engine they are making. Between the potential for situations with massive skill lag and players on older machines having 0 FPS, the massive zerg issue may resolve itself on its own without any mechanics changes.

However, as far as mechanics go, Vihar from Rage made this suggestion in a ToT podcast, and I totally agree with it. Commanders need the ability to have a "map" tag and a "guild" tag. If a guild has enough numbers to run their own squad and not get rolled by an opposing zerg, then they can flip on the guild only tag, and use it's benefits (stack on my tag, follow my tag, AE on my tag, etc). If the guild has small numbers and wants to pull together some solo players on the map, then they can flip the map tag on. Two guilds rolling together with a tag on which also pulls all the solo players to the pin in a 60+ zerg is just stupid and needs to stop.

Fine, forget the level capping, then next in line is population capping.

Cap the W3 population to the lowest of 3 parties, and only allow additional players if and only if the other parties can contribute the same number of people. If anyone leaves the other side, random boot or block additional players from entering when disparity is detected. Only problem with this is that fewer people will have a chance to play - as opposed to being able to fight but with a handicap that scales with the size difference between teams.

Again they have this system in sPvP I don't see why not bring that over to W3.

And figures you're from JQ.

So not a troll. Fair enough, this is reasoned discourse then. Let us continue good sir.

WvW != SPvP. Also you don't get a strong or large PvP community among people who are bad at it.

But more to the point: We don't need such a system. We regulate ourselves well over time. Not long ago JQ was roflstomping, that is true, it wasn't fun for me either.

But right now we on JQ are outnumbered on a lot of maps at different times. That's freaking awesome. And I Love you for it, you beautiful SoR and Blackgate bastards.

Now it's not perfect, but it'sgetting there. They may not quite have our overall numbers but they're tenacious, and I try to go to the maps where they're winning as much as I can here lately. Notice that natural self regulating tendency? Eventually some drama will happen and weaken us too, it's inevitable.

But there will always be unevenness of some sort and I don't want your system taking that away from me, the cost of that consistency is too high to pay. Those other servers are here in tier 1 because they want crazy stubborn *s like me to fight and I want to fight people who have a big set of brass balls. The population mismatch sucks sure, but it's still the best possible situation we can manage right now. People who just give up when they're not winning aren't any fun.

Letting the GW2 community self regulate is a more powerful system than anything ANet could ever come up with. We balance the tiers ourselves. Look JQ was having easy mode for a while there, but the community came together and brought the fight to us again and I have faith we'll lose our relative power soon enough.

Yes like any other good game, you need a possibility for an upset victory. Right now there's none. If you're outnumbered 4 to 1 you're toast, unless the other 4 are really stupid - but the law of averages dictates that isn't verly likely to happen.

And this is something I agree with, the thing is 1 vs. 4 doesn't happen. It's more like 3 vs. 4 happens. Big stacked servers fight big stacked servers, not random servers. BG and SoR would eat most servers for breakfast, they're in the T1 bracket for a reason.

Someone's always going to be the biggest, but that's why it's a 3 way fight. If the underdogs team up, #1 will get stomped. Every time.

For the underdogs to have a better chance of winning, we just need a better designed game. Not a "quick fix".

Zergs are a small part of a bigger picture. This is where commanders come in. An organised realm can (and does) achieve a lot more with a few smaller zergs than one big one. The problem is why are you bothering to fight a big zerg? Don't, go elsewhere. Think of the zerg as a single beast, out think it, move around it, strike where it is not. As it reacts to you it will fragment.With the servers balanced there will always be something you can do where the odds are in your favour.

If you want to fix WvW, start with the thieves (sins). They are currently destroying the side/split aspects of WvW, just like sins destroyed most aspects of GW1. I'm really disappointed that ANet made exactly the same errors again, very poor, someone there must like assassin;s creed or something, or never grew out of a juvenile ninja fixation.

If you want to fix WvW, start with the thieves (sins). They are currently destroying the side/split aspects of WvW, just like sins destroyed most aspects of GW1. I'm really disappointed that ANet made exactly the same errors again, very poor, someone there must like assassin;s creed or something, or never grew out of a juvenile ninja fixation.

It's a thread about combat balance. For the time era that this game represents the outcome of most fights really did end up as "whoever has the biggest army wins". The only way to breakup the zerg mentality is to introduce weapons which can devastate zergs. Real life armies were "zerging" right up until the invention of the machine gun. The US Civil War is a prime example of the before while World War 1 is the prime example of the after. In WW1 people were actually still "zerging" but they had to be dug in much more effectively. The only way to break up a zerg would be to introduce a machine gun defensive weapon to castles. I don't think we'll ever see that in GW2.

Anet did try to help you out though. They increased the cap for the orange swords to 25 players in combat. This means you can rally your ragtag small team of rebels and actually get something accomplished. How about a 10 man 2 golem rush against a fully upgraded tower? How bout a speed cap on an unupgraded keep? I mention these because zergs are by nature slow beasts. Even though the maps are small it still takes a zerg at least 2 minutes to cross a map. Let me drop some numbers on you to inspire your conquests:

Average response times for fastest player
Borderlands citadel spawn to
nearest towers: 2 minutes (1:30 with speed buff)
Garrison: 2:30
Far keeps: about 3:00 each
far towers: 4:00 each

Average response from garrison to north towers:
1:20 (number needs testing)
other keeps : 2:00

So if your ragtag team wants a shot at taking down bay or hills that is unupgraded, send a thief to go kick on the door at garrison then superior ram both gates. You'll be in on the lord by the time anyone knows you're capping it. And don't complain about siege costs either. Each super siege aside from golems costs slightly more than double it's sticker price at the siege merchant.
Siege values:
2x siege plans + 5 mithril ore + 5 elder wood log + 1 siege master book @ the mystic forge = 1 superior siege plans.

It's worth the expense especially for rams and catapults.

So get your guild together, go take a tower in your borderland and stop complaining that you ran into an enemy zerg. It's best to call in reinforcements or avoid them. They can't be everywhere at once without splitting up. That's when you'll own them.

Make maps larger and more spread out. If you make them too large, you're trading PvDoor. If you make them too small, you run into super zerging. We need to maps to be large enough that you have multiple avenues of attack. Right now on a borderlands, four well placed scouts at the equator of the map can relay scouting information on incoming enemy zergs for the entire map. That means I can take my super zerg and roll into your super zerg. If maps were larger, you'd be able to pull people out of position to the point that if they did, they would not be able to respond to your push on an opposite side.

Another option would be to add another tier of ballista/arrowcarts to the game that could only be built outside of keeps so that small teams could build siege in the field and ambush larger zergs as they moved through choke points. I think this would be a welcomed dynamic for small ops groups. Note that this option would take more balancing than time whereas the previous option would take both a lot of time and balancing.

Make maps larger and more spread out. If you make them too large, you're trading PvDoor. If you make them too small, you run into super zerging. We need to maps to be large enough that you have multiple avenues of attack. Right now on a borderlands, four well placed scouts at the equator of the map can relay scouting information on incoming enemy zergs for the entire map. That means I can take my super zerg and roll into your super zerg. If maps were larger, you'd be able to pull people out of position to the point that if they did, they would not be able to respond to your push on an opposite side.

Another option would be to add another tier of ballista/arrowcarts to the game that could only be built outside of keeps so that small teams could build siege in the field and ambush larger zergs as they moved through choke points. I think this would be a welcomed dynamic for small ops groups. Note that this option would take more balancing than time whereas the previous option would take both a lot of time and balancing.

Actually I like your ideas.

May be an environmental weapon that can spawn and when discovered give you advantage on securing a keep or something.

I would actually say some weapons should cost less in terms of supply required. Such as golems. Golems are very effective, yet a smaller team could never hope to assemble one - you can preassemble them, but you lose mobility and mobility is everything to a small team. Again the reason why zerging is so effective, the manpower and the inexhaustible siege weaponries.

It's frustrating because a zerg is from any angle practically impossible to beat by a smaller team.

It would help tremendously to nerf zergs if players weren't able to carry their own supply. May be have the supply come from the dolyaks that needs to be escorted to your build site. That way you can have 200 players, but you still have a finite amount of supplies. I don't know anything that would to make it so that balling in a zerg isn't going to make the team become exponentially more powerful.

May be an environmental weapon that can spawn and when discovered give you advantage on securing a keep or something.

I would actually say some weapons should cost less in terms of supply required. Such as golems. Golems are very effective, yet a smaller team could never hope to assemble one - you can preassemble them, but you lose mobility and mobility is everything to a small team. Again the reason why zerging is so effective, the manpower and the inexhaustible siege weaponries.

It's frustrating because a zerg is from any angle practically impossible to beat by a smaller team.

It would help tremendously to nerf zergs if players weren't able to carry their own supply. May be have the supply come from the dolyaks that needs to be escorted to your build site. That way you can have 200 players, but you still have a finite amount of supplies. I don't know anything that would to make it so that balling in a zerg isn't going to make the team become exponentially more powerful.

Small teams have access to guild golems (50 supply) at 10 minute cooldown to dispense. I feel that golems have a diminishing effect on gates at around 8 Golems (something that I sadly don't have the math to provide). As a small ops team of 10 you can effectively have two mesmers and five in golems which would be built from the depot of a fully upgraded keep. That gives you three forward scouts and two mesmers to move the golems. This example is to show that small ops teams do work even in the current "Super Zerg" meta game, but only if not scouted ahead of time or supported by a larger guild/zerg when the small ops group gets the gates down.

The current true counter to the super zerging is outmaneuvering them with small ops teams. The issue is that these small ops teams get demoralized against the superior numbers and stop attempting to pressure at the first failure. You also run into issues of many commanders not understanding that you should support ram/golem pushes with slow treb sieging. What this would do is force the opposing force to answer multiple issues at one time. If you can manage to create enough issues that they must give ground, you will eventually take your goal.

This metagame is not acknowledged as the thirst for badges and bags is one that is never quenched. How do you tell someone who already thinks they are successful to try something different? The "Super Zerg" meta game has changed the face of the format from one that allows militia to enjoy themselves to one that requires you to be in a guild if you want to see success on a consistent basis.

What this means for hardcore guilds is that Militia, one of the main sources of recruitment for many guilds, cease to play the game unless their dailies require it. This leads to guild atrophy. I may have gotten slightly off subject, but I just want to draw the correlation to the meta game to the health of the game so that it gives the people who choose to read this another perspective of the current issues we face as a greater community.

Yes, people should be discouraged from coordinating in large groups to take large objectives. Makes complete sense. Lol.

The only really big "fixes" WvW needs IMO is changing out how ineffective defensive playing can be. It feels like it is easier to attack from the outside up to the walls than it is for someone on the walls to attack down. This should not be the case and the advantage should traditionally be in favor of the defenders.

The rest is a simple matter of playstyle and personal preference in how you conduct yourself in WvW.

While I applaud the OP in the desire and attempt to voice some ideas into the black void of 'soonTM' that has become Anet WvW development I don't think or see how this is the viable route to take.

On one hand you have a familiar playstyle of rally round the banner and charge and then you have the reality of what the current landscape of being on the winning side of WvW...which is have better over all coverage than your 1.5 (or less) opponents (another issue btw) and/or have such dominant coverage during a large enough section of the week to maintain a high PPT.

How do you maintain a high PPT? By playing the only game in town, cap and hold, stranglehold resources to not only upgrade your holdings (see pew-pew the enemy) but stranglehold the enemy's supply thus limiting not only their score potential but also chances to upgrade their 'stuff' and/or have the resources to effectively lay siege to your holdings.

In a whole lot of wordy-words there...basically the issue is the single minded GW:2 WvW gametype itself.

In order to take fully fortified, defenced and full of supply locations like a Garrison or Stone Mist, nevermind stupid friggin towers only at T2 upgrades (heck...even sometimes just smart players and a bit of well placed siege on non upgraded towers), having alot of numbers does it most effectively (mostly).

If each of the maps were based on differing game types, or to a lesser extent even built into the macro-map control gameplay of each map itself, then there would be an organic reason for small/smaller sqad play instead of forcing it on to the existing gameplay.

Others have brought up another issue which is the current set of WvW maps are designed to funnel groups of people into various areas with designed choke points...never mind on the larger/largest conquerable structures on each of the maps...or an even greater sin...of having vast swaths of the map devoted to nothing and minor pve/brimming with aggro trash mobs/uninteresting non-score impacting boss events (see more pve in my pvp).

Those pbaoe aoe's spam sessions will become pbaoe bags of loot piles with no aoe limit. They run in, stack up, get hit with AOE & shorlty later they're watching people loot bags over their dead bodies typing WTF... while they look at the list of servers for somewhere else to xfer.